Well, never mind that, too.That was just the authors taking artistic license, or something.

After a long wait, the authors published a FAQ of their paper. It’s over at RC. Of course.

It’s been some good popcorn eating material. Some of it is absurd, some of it silly, and some petty.

As mentioned the long awaited FAQ is here. Now, I’m not sure where to put this, in the silly or absurd category. For the most part the answers to the frequently asked question were questions only from the voices in the authors heads. But, if you read that you knew it would go that way as soon as you read the first imaginary question…….

“Q: What is global temperature?”

What? Yes, I’m quite certain that was the most frequently asked question of team Marcott. People critiquing and studying the paper first want to know what global temperature is. In a sad twist, they managed to get it wrong but, that’s what invented statistics will do for you.

The second imaginary question was of equal stupidity.

Q: Did you collect and measure the ocean and land temperature data from all 73 sites?

Who the h….. What possessed….. in whose imagination …….. sigh.

Steve McIntyre called it filibustering. I’d call it filler and misdirection. They didn’t answer any questions. They babbled bs. About the only thing which piqued my interest was this…..

Q: Is the rate of global temperature rise over the last 100 years faster than at any time during the past 11,300 years?

A: Our study did not directly address this question because the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of ~120 years on average, which precludes us from examining variations in rates of change occurring within a century. ……. We showed that no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, …………Any small “upticks” or “downticks” in temperature that last less than several hundred years in our compilation of paleoclimate data are probably not robust, as stated in the paper.

Which is what I already said nearly a month ago. Of course, this then would logically raise questions about the stupid uptick on the graph. That’s for later.

Hysterically, ironically? In the very next Q/A these imbeciles state,

…..We conclude that the average temperature for 1900-1909 CE in the instrumental record was cooler than ~95% of the Holocene range of global temperatures, while the average temperature for 2000-2009 CE in the instrumental record was warmer than ~75% of the Holocene distribution. …..

That’s great. They know this because “Any small “upticks” or “downticks” in temperature that last less than several hundred years in our compilation of paleoclimate data are probably not robust“. I would try to help them out with that tricky math stuff about 10 being less than several hundred, but, it’s RC and my comment probably wouldn’t survive.

After one suffers through the rest of the babbling sophistry, we get to the comment. It’s a bit confusing at first. I think some of the commenters thought they’d get to ask the authors their own questions, as opposed to the authors answering only the voices in their heads. Sadly, no. They were treated with Gavin’s piercing insights. Things like…..

I think this is just the location of the 0º C anomaly baseline. – gavin]

[Response: Can you be specific? …..

But, I do love this one………

[Response: Sorry, but no. It is not Marcott et al that provide the estimates of the modern warming – they don’t have sufficient proxies in the last 50 to 100 years to robustly estimate the global mean anomaly. This was stated in the paper and above. Their conclusions, as discussed in the paper and above, come from comparisons of their Holocene reconstruction with CRU-EIV from Mann et al and the instrumental data themselves. The headline conclusion follows from that, not the ‘uptick’ in their last data point. – gavin]

That is a beautiful slight of hand! Better, the authors didn’t state this, so they can’t be held to it! Refer back up to the last graph. You see, they didn’t splice anything!!! They just jacked around with the proxies until it looked exactly like Mann’s idiocy, which is a splice of temp data to treeometers and compared it to the Marcott reconstruction! ……. to underscore how it wasn’t robust, or something.

Now that’s a dance step any politician of the Clinton variety would be proud of!!!

But before one could get their head around the “What is global temperature?” question. Something else pops up. In the FAQ post, they link back to some Marcott apologist work by Tamino or Foster Grant…. or whatever. You can read most of this here at WUWT….

Andy Revkin, nutter journalist, who has been in contact with most of the actors in this drama, finds the link and posts them on his NY Times blog. Now, I’m not sure of the sequence, but at Tammy’s we see or saw this……

“Grant, I find it just plain bizarre that you wrote all this and never even mentioned Steve McIntyre, who first figured out what Marcott had done wrong, and whose excellent work is the whole reason you wrote this.”

For your information, Davy boy, McIntyre’s contribution to this was limited to his every effort to discredit the entire reconstruction, to discredit Marcott and his collaborators, and of course his usual knee-jerk spasms at the sight of anything remotely resembling a hockey stick, sprinkled literally with thinly veiled sneering.

Also for your information, the original version of this post mentioned McIntyre (and linked to his posts) extensively. But prior to posting I decided to remove that, since McIntyre had already fully explored the “low road.”

But, this too was a distraction. In spite of Revkin’s nutjobbery, one could sense that he was pretty peeved by the news feeds and headlines only to be told later that the hockey stick in that paper didn’t count.

JC advice to the skeptical blogosphere: Lets get to the bottom of this, but while doing so I remind you that one element of this is the struggle for the scientific souls of two promising young scientists. Please don’t overegg the pudding and inadvertently send them to the RealClimate refugee and training camp. Cordially invite them to engage, and work with them to try to change the culture in the paleoclimate community.

Uhmm, no Judy, dear. That’s wrong thinking. They are supposedly grown men. Their character is established already. How will they flop? It’s hard to say. But, either way they go it’s a win for the skeptics! Imagine if we could just get them to write another paper like this one!!!! How cool would that be for the skeptic community?

OTOH, if they want to put their big-boy panties on, grow up, have a sense of honesty and hang with the skeptics, they just might learn something about science.

What is Global Temperature?
Q. If SATs cannot be measured, how are SAT maps created ?
A. This can only be done with the help of computer models, the same models that are used to create the daily weather forecasts. We may start out the model with the few observed data that are available and fill in the rest with guesses (also called extrapolations) and then let the model run long enough so that the initial guesses no longer matter, but not too long in order to avoid that the inaccuracies of the model become relevant. This may be done starting from conditions from many years, so that the average (called a ‘climatology’) hopefully represents a typical map for the particular month or day of the year.
“Extracted from Posterior”
I Love to introduce this Q&A from GISS:

I have been watching also. I did not stop by RC as anything at that site is useless. Airhead, Foster, is worse. Some of the other players are warmists, dressed as sceptics, trying to infiltrate the realist camp.

BTW:
The current claim is if you look at Marcott, etal, Mann, whatever, then GISS’ regurgitated NCDC defecation, you will see the temperatures warmer than anytime in the last 4,000 years.
It would help if you

I have great respect for Dr. Curry. You astutely pointed out her “motherly” instincts kicking in, and I agree. But at the same time, you have to realize where she comes from. She was an alarmist until she actually read, with an open mind, the criticisms of the alarmists positions. I would classify her as a Luke Warmist now. She believes there is Global Warming, but no longer blindly attributes it to Man. It is from that perspective that she is trying to keep Marcott et. al. from falling into the “religious” camp, and cultivating true scientists.

This whole Marcott fiasco is amusing as it is a sign of desperation. New students were abused to create a justification for the “team’s” agenda.

Even young men are susceptible to intimidation by supposedly “Gods” of their fields. So I hope that we can ween them from the teats of the Alarmist religion and into the realm of scientific enlightenment.

“JC advice to the skeptical blogosphere: Lets get to the bottom of this, but while doing so I remind you that one element of this is the struggle for the scientific souls of two promising young scientists. ”

Judith wants to be nice there. I’ve seen Shakun in the Revkin interview. He bragged about their uptick. Quite clearly he cherished the attention and if it was only his own notebooks camera – after all, he was talking to a guy in the employ of the Hanoi Times itself!

I see two promising young propagandists. But maybe that’s the new definition of scientist; at least when bought and paid for by the government.